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Charles Mann presents compelling evidence that the earliest Americans built and occupied cities that rivaled anything found in Europe at the time, in the book 1491.

The European explorers stumbled on a world vastly more complex than the one commonly taught in history classes. So says writer Charles Mann, who describes a western hemisphere crowded with millions of people inhabiting a landscape they'd largely shaped with their own hands. Mann's book 1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus points out that in South America, the native Americans built earthworks and roads that stretched for hundreds of miles. And they planted a garden we know today as the Amazon rainforest.